Nuclear Power
Make Standardisation Possible? To contribute towards standardisation, the nuclear industry should: ■ Develop standard reactor designs to a high level of detail. ■ Harmonize industry own standards and requirements. Efforts should be focused on achieving international convergence of industrial codes and standards applicable to all components that affect safety, as well as of overarching utility requirements.
■ For the benefit of operators, expand the use of existing feedback-sharing mechanisms during construction and operation across utilities and national borders.
■ Enhance the role of “Owners’ Groups” (a cooperation network between a vendor and utilities operating that vendor’s design) and by establishing mechanisms for long-term design knowledge management. These actions will facilitate information exchange preserving design knowledge and stimulating design improvements within and across international nuclear power plant fleets.
■ With major participation by vendors, develop design- specific training material which could aid utilities in the operation of standard plants and regulators in certification reviews and subsequent operation oversight of standardized facilities.
■ Share, with governments and regulators, information and expertise relevant to adapting the regulatory framework toward standardisation. Vendors should also share license application documents with other applicants and other countries’ regulatory authorities, insofar as the protection of proprietary information allows.
Facilitating Standardisation Governments and regulators should help create mechanisms specifically designed to foster cooperation on standardisation among industry, regulators and law and policy makers. This effort should extend from national to regional and international levels. Harmonization of regulation will provide the essential framework to facilitate international standardisation of reactor designs. The CORDEL proposal is a set of actions envisaged in three phases: 1) Share design assessment. Once a design is licensed in one country, the approving regulator should share information with other national regulators, conveying its full experience in the safety assessment of the design, and receiving regulators should draw upon this experience. Additionally, if several regulators are concurrently reviewing the same design, they could form a collaborative network and
worldPower 2010
discuss their assessment methodology (including criteria) and share their assessment results. This sharing process, which can be undertaken without any change in existing regulatory frameworks, may itself foster tendencies toward harmonization of licensing standards and procedures.
2) Validate and accept design approval. Once a design is licensed in certain countries, such design approval could be taken by other countries’ authorities after validation as sufficient for licensing there. Although using this simplified validation procedure would heighten efficiency for industry and regulators, it may require some adjustments in existing national regulatory and legislative frameworks.
3) Issue international design certification. By international agreement, a procedure could be created whereby a design could be certified by a team of national regulators (from countries with a direct interest in the design). Under the agreement, participating countries would accept this certification. Alternatively, such international certification could be facilitated by a designated international organization. Of course, national regulators would remain responsible for assessing the adaptation of the internationally certified design to local circumstances and for the supervision of construction, commissioning and operation.
Expanding regulatory harmonization has to be
simultaneously facilitated by alignment of licensing processes and by harmonization of national safety requirements, which currently vary significantly from country to country.
Ongoing Regional & International Initiatives It should also be recognized that there is already some
movement in this direction, exemplified by the following: ■ Efforts are in hand to identify differences and develop aligned international codes and standards in various domains such as mechanical codes and instrumentation and control (I&C) through such organizations as ASME and AFCEN, and IEEE and IEC.
■ Overarching utility requirements for new reactor designs have been developed by EPRI-URD in the US and EUR in Europe.
■ A number of multinational regulatory initiatives have been created, the most promising in the area of harmonization being the Multinational Design Evaluation Programme (MDEP). One of its objectives is to establish convergent reference regulatory practices. CORDEL proposes that MDEP should be given a more important and formally enhanced role, working closely with the IAEA, as a major driver
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